Screwtop/The Girl Who Was Plugged In (1989)

I didn’t enjoy Vonda McIntyre’s “Screwtop”. There were interesting ideas but they were never developed.

James Tiptree Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” had a fantastic premise but the beginning and end suffered from the writing style. Too experimental? Too clever? There was a point where the story was climaxing with Paul, P. Burke, and Delphi that was masterful, but then the ending reverts to the ‘too clever by half’ writing style of earlier.

So, 1 star for Screwtop and 3 for Tiptree’s story (should have been a 4 easily and could have been a 5).

Overall, since these Tor volumes are hard to rate, I’ll go with 3. If I was just rating the Tiptree piece, I’d probably go for 3.5 or 4 stars. ( )

"The Girl Who Was Plugged In," originally published in 1973, won the Hugo for that year. McIntyre's work, "Screwtop," was originally published in 1976, and already the world had started to change. I liked Screwtop well enough, but the winner here is Tiptree's work.

I'm vaguely annoyed that TOR decided to insert a random snippet of some up and coming novel (Swordspoint, by Ellen Kushner), in the center, I suppose to add pages (46, give or take a blank page or so). ( )

My reactions to reading this double in 1998. Spoilers follow.

“Screwtop”, Vonda N. McIntyre -- An engrossing but not terribly memorable story about life in a prison camp on an alien world. The characters were fairly well done. I particularly liked Gryf – the character with four genetic parents.

“The Girl Who Was Plugged In”, James Tiptree, Jr I read this after watching an adaptation of it on the Sci-Fi Channel’s Welcome to Paradox. It was a fairly faithful adaptation which shows, stripped of Tiptree’s hip language, that this is a love story. It is one of the precursors to cyberpunk with the protagonist’s displaced mind, her love affair mediated via a telepresence. It reminded strongly of Frederik Pohl’s classic “Day Million”. (I have no idea if Tiptree was consciously responding to it or not.). Both talk directly to the reader in a chatty, edgy vernacular (though this story is substantially longer) and are love stories made bizarre and rococo by future technologies. I’m not a fan of Tiptree and consider her overrated, but I liked this one. ( )